The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Finding definitions from textual sources is becoming an increasingly important feature in internet search engines, desktop search applications, and related search applications. An example of a related search application is a question answering (QA) application of the type designed to give a user specific answers to specific questions, as opposed to listing somewhat generically related links to web pages or documents as is typically provided in more traditional search engines. Using these various search applications, it is often desired to find definitions for a word, term or phrase, or to find information about a person (also referred to here as a definition).
With the growing amount of textual information found on the web, in e-mail, and/or in personal desktop data, new terms are being created every day, before dictionaries and encyclopedias have been updated with the terms. For example, the word “blog” was at one time not in the dictionary, yet even then internal textual sources of information relating to this word could be found. For example, relating to the word “blog,” an internal textual source of information might include descriptive sentences like the one shown in Example 1: